Even before Thanksgiving, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and Brenda Lee were reborn for the holiday season, with classic songs of theirs — “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” — materializing anew like Frosty the Snowman himself. Like egg nog and advent calendars, their seasonal tunes pop up everywhere for a month and then disappear, only to be repackaged and resold 11 months later.
For millions of people, those songs signify the season, but for me — for my memories of childhood in the late 1970s — they can’t touch one of the most persistently reissued holiday albums of all time. Christmas With The Chipmunkshas sold millions of copies in the last half-century, and it gets reissued in some form or another every year, usually with bonus tracks and new songs to add to the din of the season for generations of beleaguered parents.
—Stephen Thompson, via Hail To The Chipmunks: A Holiday Classic Re-Revisited
